How New Languages Emerge

The transformational generative grammar theory is one of the linguistic theories that caused fundamental changes in linguistics since 1950s. This theory is based on the themes: deep structure and surface structure. Chomsky, who introduced the transformational generative grammar, explained the language with processes in mind in 1950s by including mind processes into linguistics. He clarifies the concept of deep structure in mind processes. He aims to emphasize the thought aspect in language by deep structure. This research intends to reveal that the theory of Chomsky depending on the mind processes and explained as the thought aspect in language: deep structure indeed dates back before the 1950s. Within this context, Nahiv as one of the works of Fitrat is analysed. As a linguist Fitrat displays the deep structure by establishing a relationship between the mind and language and drives the semantics forward. This research indicates the similarities between the deep structures of Fitrat (in Nahiv) and Chomsky. This research is done by means of document analysis method as one of the qualitative research methods. Content analysis method that is one of the data analysis methods is used. Similarities between the deep structures of Fitrat’s and Chomsky’s are identified. As a result of the study, it is proved that the deep structure which constitutes the fundamentals of transformational generative grammar theory is introduced before the 1950s and this work of Fitrat has already been designed in the transformational generative grammar system.

On the Origin and Causes of Sound Change: A Review of Related Literature

In this paper, I attempt to offer a general outline of my views on the origin and evolution of language. I do not pretend in any way to a completely new conception of language evolution. It seems to me that all the most important and productive hypotheses about the origin of language have already been made before, and it is only a matter of putting the pieces of the puzzle together correctly. As far as I can see it, the evolution of language is directly related to the embedded and embodied emotional types, which served as the basis for the subsequent categorization of perceived objects, and thus laid the ground for the formation of first an internal language (of thought), and then an external verbal language. Consistent with this, the paper is organized as follows. In the Introduction I briefly describe the problem I am facing in this article and outline a plan for solving it. Next section comprises a survey of relevant empirical findings related primarily to the processing and understanding of abstract terms and concepts. In my view, it supports the idea of the close connection of abstract terms proceeding, and thus language comprehension, with emotional states. The third section provides relevant theoretical considerations of the relationship between emotions, cognition, and language. Consistently considering various theories of emotions and concepts of language formation, I pay attention to the connection between affective states and language as a sign system. In the fourth section, my views are presented directly. In so doing, I illustrate my approach with a telling example that shows how, in the course of evolution, embedded and embodied emotional responses and reactions could become the building blocks first for the internal language of thought, and then for the external natural language.

Words can mean different things to different people. This can be problematic, mainly for those working together in a bureaucratic institution, such as the secret service. Shared, certified, explicit and codified definitions offer a counter to subjective, solitary and/or culturally dominant definitions. It’s true that codified secrecy terms for secret services can be seen to involve a number of political, cultural, subcultural “languages”, but if words come from unclassified or declassified files, memorandums and/or records, one needs a deep understanding of the secret services. A remarkable feature of this bureaucratic language is the evolving nature of, certain “keywords” as important signifiers of historical transformation. Thus, the changes in the language of the secret services depends at least as much on the internal changes of the secret services as on the transformation in the external political-social environment. In spite of the confusion of Hungarian secret services in the revolutions of 1918–1919 and the disintegration of the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, in the early 1920’s became a stable system. Between the two World Wars, the Hungarian State Police directed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (hereinafter referred to as MIA), the Military Intelligence and Counter-Espionage directed by the Ministry of Defence (hereinafter referred to as MoD), and the Hungarian Royal Gendarmerie directed by both of the Ministries had their own operational service. This structure existed unchanged until 1945. Simultaneously with the forward advance of the soviet troops, government began to re-establish the former system of the secret services in the eastern part of the country. After WWII, in 1946, the “State-protection Department” as political police became independent from the police. However, from the beginning, they remained under the control of the Communist Party. After 1950, the State Security Authority provided special services for the MIA and the Military Political Directorate of the MoD. After quashing the revolution in 1956, in the spring of 1957, the MIA Political Investigation Department was established which—with slight modifications—kept the structure created during the “state protection era”. The MIA III. The State-Protection General Directorate was established in 1962. The reorganization was finalized in the middle of the 1960’s, which resulted in the new system, which—with the structure of Directorates—became the ultimate structure of the state secret police until the abolishment of the MIA General Directorate III in January 1990. These organizational transformations were largely the result of exogenous historical-political changes. Moreover, each new period had a major impact on the organizational communication, language use and vocabulary of the secret services. This study seeks to interpret these historical transformations.

Spanish marks animate and specific direct objects overtly with the preposition a, an instance of Differential Object Marking (DOM). However, in some varieties of Spanish, DOM is advancing to inanimate objects. Language change starts at the individual level, but how does it start? What manifestation of linguistic knowledge does it affect? This study traced this innovative use of DOM in oral production, grammaticality judgments and on-line comprehension (reading task with eye-tracking) in the Spanish of Mexico. Thirty-four native speakers (ages 18–22) from the southeast of Mexico participated in the study. Results showed that the incidence of the innovative use of DOM with inanimate objects varied by task: DOM innovations were detected in on-line processing more than in grammaticality judgments and oral production. Our results support the hypothesis that language variation and change may start with on-line comprehension.

While much has been written about Gibraltar from historical and political perspectives, sociolinguistic aspects have been largely overlooked. This book describes the influences which have shaped the colony’s linguistic development since the British occupation in 1704, and the relationship between the three principal means of communication: English, Spanish and the code-switching variant Yanito. The study then focuses its attentions on the communicative forms and functions of Gibraltarian English. The closing of the border between Gibraltar and Spain (1969-1982), which effectively isolated the colony, had important social and linguistic repercussions. This volume presents the first full account of the language attitudes and identity of a new generation of Gibraltarians, all of whom were born after the border was re-opened. Adopting a variationist approach, this study analyses the extent to which the language use and phonetic realisations of young Gibraltarians differ from those of previous generations and the factors conditioning language variation and change.

The theory predicts complete lexicalization when the number of exceptions to a rule exceeds the threshold, which leads to morphological gaps: without a productive rule, you only know the derived form if you hear it otherwise ineffability arises. Detailed numerical studies for gaps in Russian, English, Spanish, and Polish. The Tolerance Principle also directly bears on language variation and change, in that it provides/predicts the conditions under which language change is actuated. As a case study, the theory explains why—and when—the so-called dative sickness, and other instances of case substitution, took place in Icelandic in the 19th centuries.

Göz Kaufmann, who obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1997, completed his habilitation treatise in 2016 and received the venia legendi (livre docência) in German Linguistics from the University of Freiburg, Germany. He holds a permanent position as a senior lecturer (Akademischer Oberrat) for linguistics in the German Department of the University of Freiburg. Kaufmann’s main research areas are sociolinguistics, language contact, language variation, and language change. In the area of language variation and change, his focus is on German minority varieties spoken in South America, particularly Mennonite Low German and Pomerano. Aside from lexical and morphological variation, he analyzes syntactic variation in these varieties combining variationist and generative approaches. Göz Kaufmann worked in Brazil as a guest professor and representative of the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) at the UFRGS and the USP. At the University of Pelotas (UFPel), he has already taught several courses and presented numerous talks. For more information, see http://paul.igl.uni-freiburg.de/kaufmann/?Home

Research has shown that language change is driven on one hand by forces internal to language itself such as grammar-internal systematic pressure, and on the other hand by social motives such as social identity. Language contact presents new features, but why is it that some of them are incorporated as variation and evolving into language change, while others are not? This paper reports a study on a sound change in Shanghainese, a dialect of the Chinese language. Data were collected in natural contexts of conversation followed by a brief interview with informants to gain identity related information about them. It has found that previously negative perception of status attached to a new sound induced by language/dialect contact changed into a positive perception, and people started to identify positively with this new sound. Further, there were differences in various different age and gender groups in taking up the new sound. As a result, this sound has evolved from a nonnative alternative to a systematic variation and it is being established as a sound change. This study has thus further confirmed that social identity plays a pivotal role in driving language features into language variation and language change.

Dialectology is not a coherent field with a single set of methodologies. Instead, it has developed since the 1960s to become an interest of many different interconnected fields, from typology to geographic information systems (GIS), from historical linguistics to phonetics. Within all of these subareas, dialectology has become increasingly more computational. The study of dialects is one of the oldest fields of language study, and the modern examination of dialects involves both linguistic and social analysis. As an example of its lineage, the American Dialect Society was founded in 1889; the scholarship those members produced between then and the 1960s could be described as a closely related set of methodologies designed to document words and pronunciations in order to delineate primarily geographical dialect boundaries and, secondarily, language change. From the 1960s forward, the study of dialects developed through the emerging fields of language variation and change, sociolinguistics, and computational linguistics. Modern scholars of dialects, be they starting off or established, should be aware of the wealth of information produced from the significant effort of the earlier decades of dialectology, and some gateways to that scholarship are cited herein. For example, the journal American Speech was established in 1925, and its early volumes are worth investigating for modern scholars to understand the changes in methodologies and research questions that have occurred. For this bibliography, however, most of the citations point to the diversified period from the 1960s forward. During that time, dialectology ceased to be a single entity, but instead became a subcomponent of many different fields. The plethora of language-related handbooks that publishers now regularly produce often contain a chapter related to dialect variation. With the diversity of dialect methods came an explosion in the number of publications on dialects. Additionally, for the over 6,900 languages on earth, scholars have come to realize that the many thousands of dialects offer opportunities to study how language and society work. Most of the scholarship involving dialects is focused on linguistic research questions, but dialect variation has proved a useful area of focus for scholars of social analysis. With the thousands of publications on dialect variation produced over the last fifty years, the citations provided here should be seen as worthwhile examples and gateways to other quality scholarship. From the works cited here, various paths of modern dialect research unfold.

New words are regularly introduced to communities, yet not all of these words persist in a community's lexicon. Among the many factors contributing to lexical change, we focus on the understudied effect of social networks. We conduct a large-scale analysis of over 80k neologisms in 4420 online communities across a decade. Using Poisson regression and survival analysis, our study demonstrates that the community's network structure plays a significant role in lexical change. Apart from overall size, properties including dense connections, the lack of local clusters and more external contacts promote lexical innovation and retention. Unlike offline communities, these topic-based communities do not experience strong lexical levelling despite increased contact but accommodate more niche words. Our work provides support for the sociolinguistic hypothesis that lexical change is partially shaped by the structure of the underlying network but also uncovers findings specific to online communities.

The main purpose of this paper is to relate recent findings regarding the evolution of basic color term systems to current research in linguistic variation and language change. More specifically it is to provide in the area of lexical semantics a demonstration of the hypothesis that all linguistic change has its roots in synchronic heterogeneity of the speech community (cf. Weinreich, Labov & Herzog (1968: 188) for a general statement of this position, also many empirical demonstrations already reported, such as those by Labov (1972) and Wang (1969) in phonology and by Bickerton (1973) in syntax). Before taking up this topic, I summarize some recent revisions in the basic color term theory itself. (Ethnographic semantics, color terms, language variation, evolutionary universals in linguistic change.)

Ever since the advent of generative theory, there has been a dispute in linguistics between formalist and functionalist approaches. At stake in this controversy is the autonomy thesis: i.e. the claim that linguistic knowledge is independent from, and irreducible to, the facts of language use. Under the autonomist view, language is both arbitrary and self-contained. Currently, the radically autonomous vision of syntax that is being pursued in Chomskyan circles has lent new urgency to the question whether phonology and syntax can in fact possess autonomy to the same degree. This problem has a long history (e.g. Anderson 1981), but it has lately received new and radical answers, notably through the Representational Hypothesis advanced by Burton-Roberts (2000) and Carr (2000): in the Representational Hypothesis, the language faculty is assumed to be radically autonomous, whereas phonology is functionally based and stands outside UG. This dissertation is concerned with the intermediate grammars and the variability that emerge in the course of linguistic change. It is based on evidence from the acquisition of Hebrew phonology and morphology, and a case study of a historical change affecting the grammar of Modern Hebrew. I propose a unified formal model for intermediate grammars in both language acquisition and (historical) language change, from a synchronic point of view, using the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). The topics discussed in this work are based on two different studies: (i) the acquisition path of Hebrew prosodic structure; and (ii) the variation involved in stop-fricative alternation in Modern Hebrew, as a result of historical changes. For both topics I suggest an Optimality Theoretic account of the phenomena, their cause, and their consequences. The study of language acquisition is based on two interrelated acquisition paths: (a) of prosodic structure of words out of morphological context; and (b) of prosodic structure within paradigms with regular morphophonological alternation, where the acquisition of Hebrew verb inflectional paradigms are examined. The acquisition path of words out of morphological context shows a pattern of gradual increase in prosodic structure (e.g. the number of syllables), involving a gradual increase in prosodic contrasts (e.g. diverse stress patterns), up until the child’s production is phonologically identical to the target forms. The increase in structure and contrast indicates a gradual transition from unmarked structures with input-output disparities (indicating phonological dominance) to marked structures, lacking input-output disparities (indicating lexical dominance). In the acquisition path of alternating paradigms, not only the child-adult relations are examined, but also the relation between words, where the target language itself exhibits input-output disparities, namely words drawn from alternating paradigms. This acquisition path provides evidence for the child’s restructuring of a lexical representation, as well as evidence for the transition from child-adult relation to the child’s input-output relation. In addition, I show that the phonological account of the acquisition of inflectional paradigms provides evidence for morphological development. One of the interesting findings in this regard is the emergence of morphological knowledge before actual inflectional suffixes are produced by the children. This finding would not be available without examining the interaction between prosodic and morphological factors. Another crucial finding dealt with in my study of acquisition is the scope of variation in the course of acquisition. I found that variation in children’s production is limited to the acquisition of the lexical contrasts existing in the language, and is not found in the acquisition of alternation resulting from phonological restrictions. The model I suggest for change in the course of acquisition predicts and explains this finding, based on evidence that children do not violate universal restrictions respected in the target language. The study of language change deals with spirantization in Modern Hebrew, where the alternation between stops and fricatives involves a great deal of opacity and free variation. The analysis suggested is based on a set of paradigms co- existing in the language and contradicting each other. I show that variation is restricted only to certain types of paradigms, conditioned by certain phonological properties. However, I argue that the co-existence of different types of paradigms indicates a change in the language, where the variable grammar is an intermediate phase, and the invariable paradigms indicate the direction of change. Similar to the acquisition path of single forms, and unlike the acquisition path of alternation within a paradigm, the direction of change in the case of Modern Hebrew spirantization is towards a loss of phonological generalization (i.e. towards lexical dominance). Through the investigation of language acquisition and language change, I examine in this work central issues in phonological theory, such as morphophonemic alternation and prosodic structure, in conditions of change. The phenomena investigated here provide insight to the nature of linguistic change in the following aspects: (i) the distinction between phonological properties that undergo change vs. phonological properties that do not undergo change; (ii) the directionality of change; and (iii) the scope of variation in the course of change. I argue that both language acquisition and language change share similar patterns with respect to these issues. Moreover, the change, its directionality and the variation involved, are accounted for by the same theoretical terms that account for the linguistic knowledge of a single ideal native speaker. I show that Optimality Theory suggests an appropriate theoretical framework for a unified generative analysis of this type.

This dissertation introduces and analyzes a critical multicultural pedagogical approach to the introductory linguistics course focused on the introduction to the main levels of analysis within linguistics (phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) in the context of standardized English; a nonstandardized English language variety, African American English (AAE); and a World English, Indian English (IE). The approach, which is based on the tenets of critical pedagogy and multicultural education, is centered on language variation and intended for K-12 future language arts teachers (and writing instructors at the college level) with the goal to teach them how to develop linguistically informed curriculum at the K-12 level and beyond.The course starts with an introduction to the origins of language, properties of human language, and a subsequent comparison of these properties with animal communication systems. Then, the focus shifts to the main historical periods of the English language and language change throughout these periods, followed by such topics as globalization of English, English language variation in the U.S., and the origin and some distinctive linguistic features of African American English (first brief introduction to the variety). The course further centers on the study of the main branches of linguistic analysis, which allows for a more detailed description of the prominent linguistic and paralinguistic features of AAE (and IE). The course further takes a sociolinguistic approach and explores the issues of language variation, standard language ideology, and language subordination. The last but no less important part of the curriculum is an introduction of the teaching strategies on how to compare and contrast oral and written standardized English with nonstandardized Englishes so that teachers know how to educate K-12 students on the linguistic structure of both varieties, bring awareness about the legitimacy of English language varieties, and guide students on how to communicate effectively with respect to register, context, purpose, and audience. The research findings suggest that my critical multicultural pedagogical approach and course design were instrumental in the development of students’ positive perceptions towards language variation as the result of the scientific study of the linguistic structure of both standardized and nonstandardized Englishes and the examination of linguistic prejudice and injustice in society. In fact, as a result of this examination, the students brought up the question of fair assessment practices in language arts classes, practices that address the needs of linguistically and culturally diverse K-12 students. This inquiry by the students led to

The present chapter discusses Optimality-Theoretic approaches to language change in Spanish, reviewing a number of works that invoke not only the interaction of faithfulness and markedness constraints, but also the role of perceptual, cognitive, systemic and external influences on linguistic structure and change at the level of segment and segmental inventory, syllable- and prosodic structure, and intersecting points of morphology, and mentions formal considerations that impact these. The chapter concludes with an appendix that attempts to list all works published to date that treat language change and variation in Spanish and Hispano-Romance from an OT perspective.